Dropping from the Sky thoughts

[zandoli]

I have had control issues with a wifi hotspot from my phone which my tablet was connected to and that tablet connected to the SC3 via cable.
Had to quickly land and then remembered that I had a hotspot turned on and was not in airplane mode on the tablet.
Since then I have added 'Airplane mode' to my preflight checklist.

If at all the watch is interfering with the signal, I'd assume control issues not dropping from the sky.

 

[Dani]

I never see people considering that they have a write problem on their microSD card. I've had a 64Gig card going to Read-only suddenly while it was in my pc. So what would happen if this happens whilst they are flying? Just a write error or a crash?

 

[DaveN]

I never see people considering that they have a write problem on their microSD card. I've had a 64Gig card going to Read-only suddenly while it was in my pc. So what would happen if this happens whilst they are flying? Just a write error or a crash?

That is something only Parrot can answer. After recovering my Anafi, the recovered microSD worked just fine though I haven't tried to write anything to it. My experience was that my Anafi crashed when I was taking photos and the system became 'laggy'. Some of the last photos on the microSD only had the header information and did not have the data. So you have a point.

 

[Gundamx9x1]

I never see people considering that they have a write problem on their microSD card. I've had a 64Gig card going to Read-only suddenly while it was in my pc. So what would happen if this happens whilst they are flying? Just a write error or a crash?

Wow you are the first other person I see to consider this....this is a possible cause as with almost any computer if you insert a memory card that is corrupt but still reads "which happens more often than most think" then it causes it to freeze or crash as it attempts to allocate all resources to push the data which cannot be processed because of the flaw in the card then I can totally see this occurring in the anafi and I also thank you for your insight as I am In search for the answer to the dropping anafis and I am more interested in the situations where the pilot lost response to the sc3 because if video feed stops and it free falls logic would say it is more likely a battery issue but if the anafi stays on without responding then it is likely a software/hardware problem although the initial post caught my attention as a simple search will show the rating for the app in the Google play store vs the rating of the apple store it's HUGE ios has a rating of near 5 with 4.7 whilst Android has a rating of 3.6! So yes very likely a phone issue but tomorrow I will be testing the anafi with a friends iphone 11 pro max so resources is NOT an issue so if it crashes/falls again it is certainly the anafi...p.s. I had a 16gb sandisk and just popped in a 64gb samsung that is on the compatibility list "ALSO IMPORTANT!!!" because there is a list a approved micro SD cards and phones but it is true that ios has less variations in their operating system so using an iPhone should take the phone problem out of the equation I will update on results after this weekend btw I caught it free falling yesterday so I'm super eager to resolve this as I cannot afford a new one because I got this one used and it's quite the little beast

 

[Gundamx9x1]

And also all 4 of my free falls/ crashes were during sunset/night and this also makes me question if it is happening when the light around it changes as I posted in another thread since it has the optical sensor underneath which is almost completely covered at takeoff and it takes off when there is allot of light then as crazy as it may sound when it gets dark enough it may send conflicting information because the optical sensor believes it has landed and thus stops responding to all controls even rth because it thinks it's already home or something? Idk I'm just throwing ideas out there because parrot doesn't like to share their software/hardware info that much for security reasons so we just have to use the scientific method! Eliminate all possibilities until we come up with an answer and no matter how illogical it may be it has to be it so I'm going to use my Anafi without warranty as a guinea pig because it looks like the majority are too scared to lose their baby lol

 

[Gundamx9x1]

And also pps this might also be why anafi says on their pre flight check list DO NOT FLY AT NIGHT apart from the lack of night time anti collision lights it may have more to do with it's sensors that anything

 

[Jagerbomb52]

I have been trying to get some kind of trend going for this falling from the sky. There does not seem to be any common nominator for this to happen. Today for the 3rd time I charged up my original battery that spent 3 months in the winter up in a tree in the Northern Ontario. The total battery capacity is 95%. It has duct tape where the clip used to be. My Anafi was bought in July 8th of 2018 so this battery is well over two years old. It is all up to date with the battery firmware. Flying just over 3 feet it lasted 20minutes and 13 seconds before auto landing. I have three other batteries and none have given me any problems. I really wish I could find out why some of you are having such a problem and others are not. The only difference from the other tests I did it auto landed at 4% and the other times it auto landed at 3%.

 

[Ana789]

[...] Flying just over 3 feet it lasted 20minutes and 13 seconds before auto landing. I have three other batteries and none have given me any problems. I really wish I could find out why some of you are having such a problem and others are not. The only difference from the other tests I did it auto landed at 4% and the other times it auto landed at 3%.

Ok, so give it a try and fly that in 30m(90ft) up and 50m away from HP!
My bird did the autolanding at 20% from 30 m and from 15m it fell.
Aside that it skipped the "low battery RTH" and decidet direct to auto land.

No offence, Sir, but on 3 ft you won't get anything!
Also not direct next to your homepoint!
You take important calculation parameters out of your test!

I did that a week before my chrash with all my batteries, too:
Of course no RTH, b/c 1m aside the HP
Also all batteries went down under 10% before they started to autoland.
And all got me plenty of flighttime for the test, like it was assumed.
Just my next assumption, that 20% isa save value, to land it, that was wrong!
On ONE of my batteries! The batterie just before was giving enough power till landing

 

[Jagerbomb52]

Ok, so give it a try and fly that in 30m(90ft) up and 50m away from HP!
My bird did the autolanding at 20% from 30 m and from 15m it fell.
Aside that it skipped the "low battery RTH" and decidet direct to auto land.

No offence, Sir, but on 3 ft you won't get anything!
Also not direct next to your homepoint!
You take important calculation parameters out of your test!

I did that a week before my chrash with all my batteries, too:
Of course no RTH, b/c 1m aside the HP
Also all batteries went down under 10% before they started to autoland.
And all got me plenty of flighttime for the test, like it was assumed.
Just my next assumption, that 20% isa save value, to land it, that was wrong!
On ONE of my batteries! The batterie just before was giving enough power till landing

I have flown mine hundreds of times a lot farther then your 30m(90ft) up and 50m away with no issues. This is why I am trying to find something that might be triggering these random falls and yes they are random or we all would be experiencing them and I and thousands of other people are not. Its either something you guys are doing with your batteries for storage and care, Or you have really bad luck. Thats all I can figure out.

 

[DaveN]

I have flown mine hundreds of times a lot farther then your 30m(90ft) up and 50m away with no issues. This is why I am trying to find something that might be triggering these random falls and yes they are random or we all would be experiencing them and I and thousands of other people are not. Its either something you guys are doing with your batteries for storage and care, Or you have really bad luck. Thats all I can figure out.

Often times when something seems random the issue is that there may be several issues hence the random appearance of the aggregate of falls. Or it can be one issue what triggers multiple failure scenarios. If Parrot was responsive, they would work more diligently in trying to diagnose the problem(s). I was proactive in my response to their questions in the initial report and gave them a lot of detail. The response was "Bye dear customer. Your drone is out of warranty." That doesn't solve the issue(s). In my case, the fall was when the battery was at ~48% battery, the drone was hovering stationary, and I was taking photos. In recovering the drone (which is why I have the telemetry data) I found that several of the last photos only contained the file name but no data. The indication on my iPhone that a crash was in progress was that the Freeflight app went to displaying static. So it could be a file writing issue but that shouldn't crash a drone. It could be a control cable working lose or cracking under the vibration but the drone only had a few (less than ~30) flights and you would hope the mechanics would last longer than that. Also, the Anafi does start but the downward facing camera gives an error so it won't fly but that could be because the drone was underwater for several weeks. Only Parrot knows how common the problems are and they aren't saying anything or seem to be working on a fix.

 

[BRC]

I have flown mine hundreds of times a lot farther then your 30m(90ft) up and 50m away with no issues. This is why I am trying to find something that might be triggering these random falls and yes they are random or we all would be experiencing them and I and thousands of other people are not. Its either something you guys are doing with your batteries for storage and care, Or you have really bad luck. Thats all I can figure out.

It is odd that it is random, still no fun being on the receiving end
Would be helpful if Parrot came up with a solution to truly check battery health and individual cells-
If so some of these falls might be avoided - regardless of what causes battery failures
I was hoping they would have included this in a new release

 

[Ana789]

I have flown mine hundreds of times a lot farther then your 30m(90ft) up and 50m away with no issues. This is why I am trying to find something that might be triggering these random falls and yes they are random or we all would be experiencing them and I and thousands of other people are not. Its either something you guys are doing with your batteries for storage and care, Or you have really bad luck. Thats all I can figure out.

It is not about flying it further away for the test. I did flight to "the very end of the remote-connection" before, it is about testing it higher and over your head, just for the bird in a distance to the starting point!

You need minimum to get out of the bottom sensors reach!
And you need to give the bird reason to calculate RTH-options, climbing to RTH height, distance, ....!

Or in other words:

Testing it just in front of you and in a height, where falling is not doing something, will not get you anything.
Aside that hovering is one of the few flightmodes, where the power usage is mostly total linear.
Get it up, fly around, use sport, fly a flight plan, do some Spheres during hovering (needs MORE power, for CPU and correcting/moving bird and gimbal) and "park it" in the end, 25-30% battery, a lot over the HP's altitude.
And, perhaps, use a battery which wasn't freshly charged.
Or the "second half" of one, that you used a bit earlier from 100 to 50% or such.

And because I do understand that no one wanna test that in 30 or 50 or xxx m height:
Start it somewhere below the point, you can later fly it in some meter over ground, but the bird thinks it is in 30/50/.... m!
And it still need at least to be out reach of the ground sensors!
I assume you can see a reson for that, right?

As I wrote, I did it like you, to establish a value for "autolanding critical battery level", in 1-2 m height, almost over the starting point.
I got 1 digit numbers before the autolanding, on all 3 batteries
And it landed easily.

But a couple of days later I flew one battery nicely around and landed it safe. And the next battery was :
No RTH attempt (about 50m away from starting point, but still 40-50m under RTH height)
Instead "critical battery auto landing" from 30m
And falling the last 15m to the ground.
Still had 20% battery left, afterwards

 

[Ana789]

It is odd that it is random, still no fun being on the receiving end
Would be helpful if Parrot came up with a solution to truly check battery health and individual cells-
If so some of these falls might be avoided - regardless of what causes battery failures
I was hoping they would have included this in a new release

Forget about that!
Since the "no consumer bussiness any longer", there is no such thing to expect!
Since the Anafi USA is on the market, I even believe that our Anafi was just a horse/beta-test for this project. All the way.
The "setting it free", no height limit, was, I think, the last test for the USA.

It was a nice bird, but I stay away from buying one of the "left-overs" of Parrots "abandoned" consumer business.
The USA, however, could be an interesting bird to have. ;-)

 

[Drbgaijin]

A lot of interesting thoughts being documented.
Thank you all.
Just to give some extra detail to one of my "fall from the skies", which resulted in a new drone from Parrot.
From my report about the fall.
"Wednesday May 6th 11minutes 49sec flight about 7.17 am.
Flying for about 4 minutes near a shrine. No wind. Clear view.
Switched to Photo mode and took a 360 degree Panorama.
Switched back to video recording. Flying for about 5 minutes more.
Anafi flying at about 2.5 metres. Flying slowly toward us. About 10 metres away.
Battery level at that moment was about 35%
Suddenly dropped to the ground and broke the front – right side leg."
Regards
Douglas

 

[Gundamx9x1]

It is not about flying it further away for the test. I did flight to "the very end of the remote-connection" before, it is about testing it higher and over your head, just for the bird in a distance to the starting point!

You need minimum to get out of the bottom sensors reach!
And you need to give the bird reason to calculate RTH-options, climbing to RTH height, distance, ....!

Or in other words:

Testing it just in front of you and in a height, where falling is not doing something, will not get you anything.
Aside that hovering is one of the few flightmodes, where the power usage is mostly total linear.
Get it up, fly around, use sport, fly a flight plan, do some Spheres during hovering (needs MORE power, for CPU and correcting/moving bird and gimbal) and "park it" in the end, 25-30% battery, a lot over the HP's altitude.
And, perhaps, use a battery which wasn't freshly charged.
Or the "second half" of one, that you used a bit earlier from 100 to 50% or such.

And because I do understand that no one wanna test that in 30 or 50 or xxx m height:
Start it somewhere below the point, you can later fly it in some meter over ground, but the bird thinks it is in 30/50/.... m!
And it still need at least to be out reach of the ground sensors!
I assume you can see a reson for that, right?

As I wrote, I did it like you, to establish a value for "autolanding critical battery level", in 1-2 m height, almost over the starting point.
I got 1 digit numbers before the autolanding, on all 3 batteries
And it landed easily.

But a couple of days later I flew one battery nicely around and landed it safe. And the next battery was :
No RTH attempt (about 50m away from starting point, but still 40-50m under RTH height)
Instead "critical battery auto landing" from 30m
And falling the last 15m to the ground.
Still had 20% battery left, afterwards

Speak for yourself haha I already stated I'm going to be using mine as a test dummy this past labor day and we'll I got some mixed but interesting results...1 was that I used an iPhone instead of an android but it still eventually stopped responding and the anafi started to ascend and as usual I tried pressing the altitude down nothing rth nothing closed out app and disconnected phone and reconnected but oddly enough unlike other times this time it had a controlled descent...but it might have to do with the light/optic flow sensor which slowed it when it got close to the ground? Because other users also post that their anafis had hard landings until they started using high contrast landing pads which would suggest it uses the optic flow sensor in the last moments of landing

 

[Gundamx9x1]

A

Often times when something seems random the issue is that there may be several issues hence the random appearance of the aggregate of falls. Or it can be one issue what triggers multiple failure scenarios. If Parrot was responsive, they would work more diligently in trying to diagnose the problem(s). I was proactive in my response to their questions in the initial report and gave them a lot of detail. The response was "Bye dear customer. Your drone is out of warranty." That doesn't solve the issue(s). In my case, the fall was when the battery was at ~48% battery, the drone was hovering stationary, and I was taking photos. In recovering the drone (which is why I have the telemetry data) I found that several of the last photos only contained the file name but no data. The indication on my iPhone that a crash was in progress was that the Freeflight app went to displaying static. So it could be a file writing issue but that shouldn't crash a drone. It could be a control cable working lose or cracking under the vibration but the drone only had a few (less than ~30) flights and you would hope the mechanics would last longer than that. Also, the Anafi does start but the downward facing camera gives an error so it won't fly but that could be because the drone was underwater for several weeks. Only Parrot knows how common the problems are and they aren't saying anything or seem to be working on a fix.

And also I have come to the conclusion that it is a problem with the software on the anafi as it appears to be "freezing" I.e it cannot process any more information and it is evident when I get it to head altitude many times it will NOT shut off when flipped and also as stated by another member they took pictures which did not have data before crashing and same with me on a few occasions...my next step will be to open it and clean all the internals because for all's I know dude flew it into a lake the week before selling it to me and if any contact has corossion then that is the likely culprit

 

[Gundamx9x1]

And last message for today lol regarding the batteries honestly they just suck because they are no better than regular li-po but to get a solid answer buy a usb volt meter tester and see how much the batteries are really charging I got a lot of interesting results like for example these batteries are rated for 2700mah but at supposedly 30% charge it took OVER 2700mah around 2850 so technically IT WAS UNDERCHARGED AND THEN IT OVERCHARGED IT?!?!?! so idk I want to say it's not a toy but they need to fix the small problems before rolling out to the military like that....

 

[Drbgaijin]

And also p.p.s if you live in a tropical area like Japan I'm looking at you drbgaijin then it is not necessary for it to get wet to start corroding I know because I lived in Guatemala . . . . . . . . . . .

I am normally a tolerant person when it comes to reading posts on the forums I belong to.
However, I feel I have to contradict what is being said here about Japan compared to Guatemala.
I am cutting and pasting the following information, from a site on world climates, about the climates of Japan and Guatemala.

"Guatemala is a tropical country and has two distinct seasons - wet and dry . ... Generally, the rainy season (or invierno, winter) is May through October. The dry season (or verano, summer) runs from November to April. Along the Pacific Coast, the dry season lasts several weeks longer than in other places.

The climate in Japan is mostly temperate with four distinct seasons, except for the Hokkaido area and the Okinawa region. Tokyo, along with most areas on the main island Honshu, has a humid subtropical climate characterised by warm and wet summers and mild winters."
Somebody is wrong!
Regards
Douglas

 

[Gundamx9x1]

I am normally a tolerant person when it comes to reading posts on the forums I belong to.
However, I feel I have to contradict what is being said here about Japan compared to Guatemala.
I am cutting and pasting the following information, from a site on world climates, about the climates of Japan and Guatemala.

"Guatemala is a tropical country and has two distinct seasons - wet and dry . ... Generally, the rainy season (or invierno, winter) is May through October. The dry season (or verano, summer) runs from November to April. Along the Pacific Coast, the dry season lasts several weeks longer than in other places.

The climate in Japan is mostly temperate with four distinct seasons, except for the Hokkaido area and the Okinawa region. Tokyo, along with most areas on the main island Honshu, has a humid subtropical climate characterised by warm and wet summers and mild winters."
Somebody is wrong!
Regards
Douglas

Forgive me for my ignorance, I will research more before posting.

 

[DaveN]

A
And also I have come to the conclusion that it is a problem with the software on the anafi as it appears to be "freezing" I.e it cannot process any more information and it is evident when I get it to head altitude many times it will NOT shut off when flipped and also as stated by another member they took pictures which did not have data before crashing and same with me on a few occasions...my next step will be to open it and clean all the internals because for all's I know dude flew it into a lake the week before selling it to me and if any contact has corossion then that is the likely culprit

Funny you should mention that about dropping into the lake and openig . it to clean it up. Mine fell into the lake and sat there for a while before I could retrieve it. Peeps from Parrot so I'm opening it up today (it has a vertical camera failure and the rear legs no longer lock). The original fall from sky (no prior crashes) I do believe is a firmware/software issue as my Anafi was stationary, well clear of any obstacles, and I was just taking photos when the phone screen went to static and it dove like s seabird into the water.